Sinfosky Talks About Windows 7. Or Not

With rumors abounding that we’ll hear something about Windows 7 at D6: The All Things Digital Conference later this week, comes a CNet News.com interview with Steven Sinfosky, the Microsoft honcho behind Windows 7. There are a few nuggets to be found in the interview but only a few. For example, the plan is to keep the driver model the same so that we won’t have to go throw the same sort of catch-up game waiting for drivers that we did with Vista (and XP).

We also learned that at least in this interview, Sinfosky isn’t going to spill the beans on what the plans are for Windows 7. There’s a lot of of ““we aren’t going to talk about that now” in the interview, especially on things like a ““minimum kernel.”

I call Snake Bit.

The interview is more about why Microsoft is not talking about Windows 7 at present and the giant pendulum swing that occured after the negative reaction to Vista. From the interview you can glean that some in Microsoft felt that they were a little too open in discussing the potential of Vista. Remember, things changed radically along the path of Vista’s development. Sinofsky seems to have clamped down in a major way and is talking about talking about (or not) Windows 7. I’m guessing there’s starting to be a reacton to the silence which prompted the access for this interview. While it might be a good PR move to talk about why you aren’t talking, in my opinion, the hyper-reaction to issues with Vista, shouldn’t necessarily lead to such a strenuous Apple-like clamp down. Certainly there is a middle ground.

Chris Flores also talks about how Microsoft isn’t talking about Windows 7 on the Windows Vista Blog as well. Looks like there is a major PR effort being launched about how Microsoft will communicate (or not) about Windows 7.